1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a recording device forming a printed image by attaching a droplet on recording media, a method for controlling a recording device, and an operation control program.
2. Related Art
There is a well known ink jet printer which carries out printing on various media such as paper, fabrics, films, and the like by discharging droplets of ink. Such an ink jet printer prints an image by discharging droplets of each colored ink such as cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), black (K), and the like from a nozzle, thereby forming dots on media.
In recent years, various inks have been developed, for example, among black inks, photo black ink, which is capable of producing a record having high glossy effect on glossy paper and suitable for a photo image; matte black ink which is suitable for matte paper having no gloss effect; and the like.
In JP-A-2006-240164, an ink replacement system which makes it possible to discharge plural kinds of ink using one nozzle row and if necessary, replaces inks discharged from one nozzle row is described. According to such a system, it is possible to selectively discharge either the photo black ink or the matte black ink.
However, when the ink jet printer is configured to discharge plural kinds of ink using one nozzle row, residual ink and the replacement ink may become mixed. In JP-A-2007-296651, an ink supply system is described which prevents ink mixing due to the ink replacement by providing a cleaning solution is described.
There are inks used for purposes other than forming an image. For example, as for transparent media, even though only an image is directly printed thereon, a neutral color having high brightness such as gray or the like except for a high density color such as red, blue, yellow, black, or the like in the image is not accurately displayed because it is interfered with by light transmitted through the transparent media to the image. Therefore, there have been various proposals for printing in which a background color layer is provided on transparent media and an image such as a color image, or the like is printed thereon. For example, a white ink may be used for printing the background color layer.
However, when a nozzle row filled with ink is left uncontrolled over a long time in such an ink jet printer, the nozzle may become clogged because of the ink adhered thereto, or the like, and droplets of the ink may not be normally discharged. In such a case, since the printer can not accurately form dots on recording media, it is impossible to produce fine prints. In order to prevent the nozzle from being clogged, a so-called flushing operation and cleaning operation are generally carried out.
However, since the frequency and degree of clogging in each nozzle row are different according to the kind of ink, there may be a nozzle row in which clogging is not dissolved even though a cleaning operation is carried out. For example, pigment-based white ink has particles bigger than that of the other pigment-based inks such as cyan (c), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and the like, and readily clogs a nozzle. When the particles are big, the degree of clogging rapidly becomes worse even in the early stage of the clogging and it may be impossible to dissolve the clogging only by simply repeating the cleaning operation. Therefore, it is necessary to prevent a nozzle from being left uncontrolled over a long time while the nozzle is filled with ink.